Phil Starr

Thanks all, I’m not worried too much but it is a hassle. Let’s hope it goes smoothly 😕

OK, looks like I've been conned or am a victim of an error by the vendor. You are all correct about the dropdown except that it appears to have been changed since I placed my order To my memory the dropdown when I ordered said quantity and the only options were 1 or 2 lights. 2 lights were inexplicably at the time several times the price of 1. The ad clearly stated that the stock was held in the UK (Staffordshire) and delivery was 2-3 days. I now have two emails from eBay and one enqiry via email from the vendor. One message from ebay is for the controller at £24 and the second for the light itself at £28.99 . The enquiry says it is for the light but leads to delivery tracking which has a picture of the controller. I should according to tracking recieve my light or controller today. I think it will be the controller which I don't want or need as I have one already. The delivery in 3 days would mean it has come from Staffordshire I've taken screenshots of the original ad which makes no mention of a controller other than the pop down which I believe to have been changed since I placed my order. I haven't yet found a way to contact eBay before the delivery takes place. Does anyone know if I can legally refuse delivery? If not I guess I'm about to go into battle with eBay's returns/complaints policies.

I bloody hope not. I'd better screenshot the ad but this is what it says. I'd liketo see a DMX controller with 12 bulbs with an 8deg output angle. Maybe I've posted the wrong link.

I don't think I could ever face the tension of going on stage to play that many new songs, good on you for having the ability to succeed and the nerve to try. I've played a few Rugby Clubs over the years and never had a hint of trouble. I mean they are riotous and drunken but good natured and a lot of fun. I don't think rugby is the game for you if you are going to be a **** there's too many people ready to put you straight and the game takes discipline. Some of our best gigs have been rugby clubs. Sports clubs generally are a good gig.

PLEASE IGNORE THIS RECOMMENDATION I've hit a problem with the vendor and have removed the link below I was about to recommend looking at U'King for absurdly cheap Chinese made LED lighting. My mini laser projector came from there, as did a couple PAR cans that proved too powerful to use. 180W of LED, that has to be a mis-print or bull***t?! Possibly as I've no way of measuring but the only venue I've found them useful is outdoors. I was really sceptical about anything this cheap as we probably all are but they've always been really good in the sense of as described and delivered on time. Anyway I digress, whist checking out a link for them I found an led bar that has a moving head for £28 on eBay, so I've ordered one and will get a second if it is any good. I'll report back on what I find. Can anyone go lower than this for a usable led bar? This is getting silly, in a good way

Sorry I'm such a nerd. There's a problem with all bass cabs and that is putting them on the floor, at low frequencies the floor reflects the sound and effectively reinforces the bass giving an extra 6db but only in the bass region. If there is a rear wall that adds to the effect and so does a side wall, when you get to this stage your speaker is effectively sitting at the end of a room sized horn. Just by room placement you can get the effect of cranking the bass control to full boost. At rehearsal try winding the bass control back to 3 o'clock and maybe even all the way just to get a feel of what that sounds like. In a really resonant room I've found I have to back the bass off startlingly. Most of those old Celestion drivers have a resonance around 70-80Hz so anything below that is not what you are hearing in Andy's tone, well not much anyway. I don't think it is a problem with your amp which is well regarded as being good at that sort of tone and to be fair I don't think it is a problem with the Super Compact. You can probably save some money by not rushing to buy a new cab. It might be worth going over to other parts of Bass Chat and asking if anyone else has nailed the Andy Fraser tone. Either General Discussion which is read by nearly everyone or Effects where the real tone monsters prowl would se you question and be able to offer more help. Also look in Events and see if there is a bass bash near you. It's a gathering of bassists who all bring along a lot of gear and we get to try each others kit as well as swap ideas. The South West bash is soon and there is one in the South East coming up. With so few music shops remaining its probably the only place where you will see such a wide range of basses and amplification under one roof.

No help in getting his tone other than understanding where it was coming from. Go back to the 1950's and there were no proper musical instrument speakers in the UK though Fender and others were building guitar combos inthe States. Materials used in building loudspeakers were still primitive, magnets were weaker, speaker coil often wound on paper formers and glued on with domestic adhesives. Amps were all valve jobs and usually limited in power. the first Fender amp was 7W and drove an 8" speaker. PA's were designed for public address rather than music, usually column speakers and adopted by bands. The real problem was volume, just being loud enough to be heard at all. The vox AC30 was a revolution followed very quickly by other companies including Marshall. You'll notice tha 30W was seen as a powerful amp and the AC30 needed two 12" speakers to handle the power. 25W was the handling of the typical 12" speaker in the sixties because the heat in the coil literally burned the paper formers andbroke down the glue. Because of the magnets lack of power the cones were made lighter to get more volume and the magnet gap was limited to increase the efficiency, meaning excursion was limited and there was little bass output. If you used a single 4x12 Marshall you'd need to pair it with a 50W amp if you wanted it to last very long. We suffered many blown speakers then and re-coning was pretty common. 1970 was a bit of a turning point, ceramic magnets came into wide use, heat resistant adhesives and formers increased power handling and the money generated by bands meant specialist music speakers were being designed. The first 100W solid state amps were recently introduced and though unreliable they were a bit cheaper and a lot lighter than the old valve amps. Power available was about to take off. The USA was a way ahead of the UK but both knowledge and physical imports were trickling in. Just as importantly Thiele and Small published their papers on speakers and we finally had some solid mathematical theory to bring to cab design. Free would have known nothing of this. Most UK companies were still building gear using 25-30W 12" speakers with a few 15's and 18's used for bass. Celestion, Goodmans and Fane dominated the British market. That's waht you are hearing in the Andy Fraser sound, bass is limited by excursion and lightweight cones, the lower mids are boosted to give a semblance of bass and to bring out the bass and make it sit just below the guitars. Those thin paper cones would be breaking up and giving a boost in the mids but very little output at high frequencies and they wouldn't have been using horns at this stage. Few bassists would have been using ported cabs in the UK as the theory for designing them just wasn't there, we could tune a cab but not match it to the physical and electrical characteristics of the speaker. One of the things that struck me last night listening to the live recordings is how well the bass works with the guitars in the mix, musicians in those days used their ears to work within the limits of their gear to create a great sound. Now that is creativity They were so young too!

That's kind but I'm better at theory than I am at tones. I'll do my best for Andrew though. I had a quick look and at the Isle of Wight in 1970 Andy Fraser was standing in front of a couple of full Marshall stacks and there seems to ba a WEM stack over there too. The only one I could see clearly was a couple of 4x12's with 100W valve amps on top. The nearest one seemed to be guitar cabs and the ones stage right looked a little chunkier and may have had different drivers in. However it was common in those days to split the guitar and bass stacks cross the stage so they were both sides of the drummer and guitar and bassist could hear each other. Something I used to do at the time when doing sound for bands. In 1971 Jim Marshall was still serving in the shop in Cricklewood and building amps himself as I found out when he remembered building the amp I took in to the shop for some spares. Yes Andrew I know what it is like to be 73 I suppose what I'm saying is that in those days there were very few purpose built speakers for instruments and free may have had things made up specially for them. Bassists were quit likely to use the same drivers as guitarists so that may be part of his sound. Certainly there isn't a lot of deep bass and not a lot of top end in the tne he has there. The studio tone is probably the result of a miked cab and DI mixed. Anyway i had a good time listening to the live tracks on the Free Story which was fun. So yes in general the tone you hear is that of lots of cheap drivers packed together in a big cab, lot's of 10's is really more of a late 70's early eighties thing and I think he might have used 12's for live work as above. In any case it's more about the individual speaker rather than it's size so you can get similar tones from 10's 12's or 15's. I suppose I'm saying buy a cab because it sounds right not because it has a 10" driver. You have two possible approaches. You could probably achieve something close to that tone in the studio taking the output straight from your bass and eq'ing it after it's recorded, maybe adding in some fx too. On stage you can do the same by using a neutral toned/flat response cab (FRFR) Nowadays you can get bass cabs that will do the same job as a studio monitor like the LFSys range and there are all sorts of tone settings you can download where someone else has done the work. You won't be the only Andy Fraser fan. It's even possible that someone has recorded the bass and used a computer to work out the response of the cab. You then feed that into your Barefaced which has a reasonably flat response The second approach would be to look for a cab engineered to give an old school sound. The Barefaced One10 mcomes to mind but I think that will be a bit warmer than the Free live sound. You can add in fx and tweak the eq to get closer to the sound you want. Other people will be better at guiding you then me. Apart from anything else I've got considerable hearing loss from standing too close to big speakers and even bigger drummers too often. Welcome to BassChat

You won't regret it and if you can pick up a used one you can get your money back. Hope it works out for you

Hi Al, I know that you've heard this already via a pm, but the PixelBar Switch has a swap-able front which diffuses the light and works well on the floor uplighting the band. You can set the colour and intensity via DMX or with the controls on the unit and they will work in master-slave mode so you can link them with a DMX cable and have them all the same without having to program each separately. I found the other LED bars to focussed to use in this mode as they dazzle you every time you look down. I currently use them in a vertical position on stands. This lights up your whole body more evenly and is more flattering than an uplighter. I'm no great beauty so need all the help I can get I've recently spotted these and fortunately one of our local music pubs has bought a set of 4 so I've seen them in action. At just under £30 they look good value and for just under £50 they also do a rechargeable version (12 hours light) which will cut the leads needed and set up time. Brightness isn't exceptional but plenty for my use and a set of four would light up the whole stage without distracting from you lightshow

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From Aberdeen?!

If anyone brings a BAM we'll have the set for people to try

OK I'll bring everything

I'm not sure if anyone will be interested given some of the exotica other people are bringing but I'm happy to bring along all or most of my gear on the basis of being very ordinary but someone might want to try out now that guitar shops aren't a thing. choose from Warwick Gnome, TC Elf, Peavey Minimax, Bugera Veyron. Fender Highway One Jazz, Fender American Deluxe Precision, Squier Anniversary P, Burny Thunderbird.

Hi again Andy, Just catching up to see if you've found 'your' amp yet and no I don't think you are being picky, you have identified your particular needs and are homing in on the best compromise. I think there may be a stumbling block though. The problem with micro amps in particular is heat. Class D amps are efficient but 200W is a lot of power and a lot of electricity still ends up as waste heat. Without a big case and lots of aluminium fins you really need forced air flow through the amp and you can't really lose the fan. I think this creates a problem if you want something to fit in a gig bag. You might need to be looking at amps with the quietest fan or one that only switches in when the amp starts to get too hot.

The Stagepas looks a good bet if you need the controls on the front and the compact size. If you are going to drive it from the PA I've used the RCF ART 310 as floor monitors for years and they are great with oodles of power.

Good god, one of those Mullard valves in working order is worth money on it's own and a working Treble and Bass....... Please don't take it to just any old repairer, this needs proper restoration and the choice of components used will affect the value of the restored amp, so money saved on a cheap and cheerful fix is going to be money lost. I'd be hoping to keep the amp and speakers together. Any sixties band is going to want that look. What a find:)

Listen to the man. It's a very long time since I had to calculate the size of a heatsink for a power amp but every component in your amp comes with detailed notes about the heat produced and needing to be dissipated. Look at the back of any 70's/80's power amp and you'll see huge finned aluminium heatsinks and these had to be carefully calculated to keep the internal temperature of the power transistors down below the temperature at which they would fail. You now have more power packed into pocket sized amps and thought the class D amps are more efficient huge amounts of heat have to be handled by those tiny fans. Every step from the internals of the component to the surface then across the surface to the internal heatsink and out to the fan has been calculated by someone. In a way dropping a new fan into an amp is like dropping an engine into a car, have you checked that the transmission, supension and brakes are up to the task of a bigger engine? Without the calculations I think the question is "do you feel lucky?"

I don't normally contribute to questions like this, I'm not a user of exotic amps and tend to go direct to PA at gigs and use in-ears but I do have a Monza as my back up and a couple of micro amps so here's my 10p worth. The Warwick Gnome and the Trace Elf 130W into the Monza give me plenty of volume for medium sized gigs and as a stage monitor for the whole band. I don't play full throttle bass for a rock band but that isn't what you are looking for. Either of them fit the easy fit criterion. The Gnome in particular sounds hi-fi a really clean sound, the Trace is more err... Trace, with a good dollop of midrange suckout. A really appealing sound out of the box but not neutral. As it happens I also have the Bugera BV1000M. I wonder what "Hi fi " means to you? For me it is that clean open sound, not overwhelmed by bass or worse the boost around 120Hz you get from underdamped speakers. It should also sound light and airy. My initial feeling with the Gnome is that it was just that. We did some frequency response measurements on these amps and it turns out that 'hi fi' and flat aren't the same thing . The Gnome has a quite pronounced boost at higher frequencies and the low bass is largely absent. The Bugera has an almost flat response with the tne controls set flat but sounds 'neutral' rather than 'hi fi' to my ears anyway. On my amps the fan is quieter on the Gnome thatn the Elf. DI on the micro amps is post though so not ideal for you. The last thing is the Monza, it's got a great horn and driver and is crossed over really accurately. It's also designed for you to hear those mids and tops with the clever radiation pattern. Are you just hearing sonds that were therebefore but inaudible from your playing position? I wonder if you could just filter out the unwanted high frequency elecctrical noise and let the Monza concentrate on giving you just the bass sounds you need from that wonderful mid range

Welcome to the club. I bought mine way back way before Covid for the simple reason that Andertons were selling them off cheap and I couldn't resist. They started life as floor monitors and immediately gave me way more headroom before feedback down to a truly flat response. I quickly adopted them for rehearsals and the vocal sound was so good I started using them for gigs. They've become my go to speakers for small gigs and for my semi acoustic duo and my duo partner bought a second pair for his solo gigs and for us to use as floor monitors. I now put everything through them including kick and bass and my best ever live sound for bass has consistently come from these up on poles. They are completely unspectacular, they just put out the sound you feed in to them, reliably and at volume. They aren't exactly light but the compact size means they are completely manageable and oh, that vocal sound from what is really a budget speaker.

It's interesting how difficult it is to be really sure about the power calculations. The manufacturers don't help much either. Advertising the RCF speakers as being 2000W being a case in point. Firstly that is some sort of peak power and the RMS power will be half or a quarter of that depending upon which brand you are talking about and what level of distortion it is measured at. Secondly the speakers like most modern speakers are managed by DSP. The bass unit it the 932's will probably handle only 3-400W thermal and less than that at low frequencies due to excursion limits. The speakers are protected by the DSP computer so they never go beyond their design spec so 300W peak is more reasonable other than something that lasts a few milliseconds. The limit on the compression/horn driver is going to be 50W at most. There's also an expectation that the speaker is for music not test signals and music has quiet and lout bits and it is probably designed for something like a duty cycle of around 15-20% with the design assumption that that is worse case and the real usage will be well below that. I'll give some examples: my RCF 310's 400W RMS 800W peak are marked on the back as 230V 200W maximum power. My 745's have a 3amp fuse and a maxumum draw of 700W. Those are maximum ratings under worst case. My TE Elf, 180W into 4ohms is rated as 20W average power. That's a 15% duty cycle into 8 ohms and 12% into 4ohms Another way of looking at this is to consider sound levels. The average sound level at a drummers ears is just over 100db. If you are operating with everything balanced to the drums then your PA would need to be around that sort of level too, maybe 6db higher if you are all going through the PA. From memory those speakers give 98db/W so 9W would be needed for them to produce 106db at 1m. That's loud enough to cause instant, permanent hearing damage if you are only 1m from the speaker. Even 90db can cause permanent damage after 1/2 and hours exposure (RNID) It's unlikely that your speakers are using more that 10's of watts in normal use. What this all means is that your 2000W PA is only going to consume 100W per speaker and your backline probably something similar even with a worse case 20% duty cycle. That's well under 4 amps. I doubt many of you use more than 400W of led lighting and this too has a duty cycle, because it does colours, not white light and because it flashes, so unless you run continuous lighting or old fashoined incandescent bulbs you'll probably be running the lights on 2amps current. Your single 13A fuse is never going to blow and there is no way you will disturb a 30A ring main. You probably won't blow a 5A fuse but I don't think I'd try that. I haven't blown a mains fuse in 15 years since I moved to plugging in to a single socket for everything.

The Deltabass is roughly the same power as the Gnome/Elf which I use regularly and is also why I don't really need the Peavey. The Gnome does the job. If I think the amp is going to struggle to make the volume I'll trim the bass a tiny bit and boost the mids to make the amp cut through. Hope the gig goes well.

If you are completely stuck and have a gig coming up I have a Peavey Minimax I could lend you for a couple of weeks. Depends upon where you are in deepest Devon. PM me if you want to take this up, you'd need to drive up to Chard.

Distance trading regulations mean you don't even need to prove there is a fault. You have 14 days to return the amp for a full refund but you will have to pay postage unless they offer free returns in their ads. Distance trading regulations in the UK are primarily governed by the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, which replaced the earlier Distance Selling Regulations. These regulations require sellers to provide clear information about goods and services, including cancellation rights, and give consumers a 14-day period to cancel their orders after receiving the goods. which.co.uk autotraderinsight-blog.co.uk Overview of Distance Trading Regulations in the UK Distance trading regulations in the UK are primarily governed by the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. These regulations replaced the earlier Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 and provide essential rights and obligations for consumers and sellers involved in distance selling. Key Features of the Regulations Consumer Rights Cancellation Period: Consumers have the right to cancel an order for goods within 14 days from the day they receive the goods. For services, the cancellation period starts from the contract formation and lasts 14 days. Information Requirements: Sellers must provide clear information before the contract is concluded, including: Description of goods or services Total price, including taxes and delivery charges Payment methods and delivery details Right of cancellation Seller Obligations Pre-Contract Information: Sellers must communicate essential information in a durable medium (e.g., email or paper) before the contract is finalized. Delivery: Goods must be delivered within 30 days unless otherwise agreed. Refunds: If a consumer cancels, sellers must issue refunds within 14 days of receiving the cancellation notice. Exceptions to the Regulations Certain contracts are excluded from these regulations, including: Goods and services valued at £42 or less Financial services (e.g., pensions, mortgages) Contracts for the construction of new buildings Regularly supplied food and drink These regulations ensure that consumers are protected when purchasing goods or services at a distance, promoting fair trading practices. which.co.uk Wikipedia